some bad parking

I saw a post several days ago that reminded me of this story.. so of course, I had to run and take pictures so I could tell it. : )

We bought a van when Bub was a tiny baby. Well.... he was a baby. That boy was never tiny! : ) But anyhoo, we bought a van and it served us well through all the years of Bub's life and beyond. One of the fun things we did during what the doctors called our 'good time'... meaning we knew he wasn't going to make it, but he still felt great and acted like a regular ole kid... was go to an aquarium in a big city near us. And we came away from that day with more than memories.

We ran into a post in the parking lot while trying to park the van. And it left a nice little dent over one of the front tires. We never got it fixed. For one thing, during that time, a small cosmetic dent wasn't high on our list of priorities. And then later on, we just decided we didn't care, I guess. I say that, and yet I hate dents, dings and scratches. There's nothing like a brand new car that doesn't have any 'stories' to tell yet.

So I loved it when we bought our new van. It was the first time we had a car (it's a van, but I call it a car anyway) that had fenders the same color as the exterior. (in other words it wasn't silver or black) So I fell in serious like with my new fenders... so pretty.

One day about two weeks into my new van's life, we came home from a little errand and Boo was going to hop out and do something and hubby and I were going to wait for her in the van. In the garage. Well.. for some unknown reason, I decided in my sheer brilliance that we should put the garage door down. Well... the one little thing I didn't know was that he had not pulled the van into the garage quite enough for the door to close. But since the car was new, that fact didn't click with either one of us.

Until we heard the horrible SCRAPING sound. We both looked at each other wide eyed and then hopped out of the van to discover this...



...a big ole scratch down the back fender. We still had paper tags and look what had already happened. We used to pull up to this klassy little hole in the drywall of the garage.. and I think that's what happened that day. So I set out to make sure nothing like that happened again.

Now we know to pull up to the smiley face. At least we could still smile after a frustrating day. But ya know, I think that's one of the things we've taken away from some of our experiences... don't sweat the small stuff. Because just about everything is small stuff in light of some of the trials we've faced... and in light of eternity.

Hope you have a nice weekend. School is out and I think I'm going to take a little bloggy R&R for a few days. Hugs to ya!